While I personally feel like this was explained well enough in the game, maybe some feel otherwise. The concept is meant to be that the memories are downloaded and stored, but then (especially based on the doctor's video game idea) there's an extrapolation of and expansion on the actual memories. That allows it to be a navigable, interactable world for the one viewing the rendered model of the past.
The dude in the present-day timeline slaps on his goggles and says to himself words to the effect of, "Okay, time to see if there's anything good in here that can be made into a video game."
That strongly,
strongly suggests that he's reviewing the data he actually got from the subject's memory, and the timeline -- as in, the lack of virtually any time at all between him extracting the memories and reviewing them -- further supports that implication.
One reason I called it a complete self-own is because just a tiny bit of extra effort would've smoothed it out completely.
WHY are VN's are full of human shaped furry critters, chicks with huge donkey dicks, women with breasts the size of watermelons and men with penises that could never technically fit in their pants? Not to mention all the chicks are smoking hot. Where did all the ugly ones go? And why are almost all of the characters fresh out of College?
These things shall forever more remain one of life's great mysteries.
A couple of thousand years from now when Archeologists are digging up our stuff I'm pretty sure it's going to confuse the hell out of them.
Because there's a difference between external consistency and internal consistency. If you don't understand that, maybe other people giving you the benefit of the doubt in this thread should reconsider.
"There are dragons in this story. Yeah, there are no dragons in real life. Deal with it."
That's about external consistency -- an explicit violation thereof that the potential reader/viewer/player can either accept or reject outright.
"Days and nights on this planet are only twenty minutes long apiece, regularly alternating. Clearly I know that that's not how it works in the real world. Oops, I had other things to deal with and suddenly it's been daylight for six hours straight in this fictional world of mine. Oh well. Fiction sure is crazy, right?"
That's a violation of external consistency at first... but then it leads to a violation of internal consistency.
On a broader note, if you were in such a hurry to get to the "game within a game that's the actual game that I think my players want to play," and you apparently have zero interest in playing with or seriously interrogating the concept of memory... why even bother with all that setup in the first place? Even if it's one of your darlings for some reason, you should consider killing it.
You didn't really want to limit the material to the older woman's memories. You didn't even want her to be the focal/anchor character. You didn't want to explore the idea of "changing the past" in a subjective sense as a form of therapy. You didn't want to challenge players on any level with the fact that memories are difficult for people to consciously, proactively change.
If the game you made had just straight-up been the "game within a game yadda yadda," what would have been lost?
